A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning (2016)
meltingasphalt.com
meltingasphalt.com
Ikigai[0] is worth exploring if you find yourself questioning the grand meaning of things:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai
> The Oxford English Dictionary defines ikigai as "a motivating force; something or someone that gives a person a sense of purpose or a reason for living". More generally it may refer to something that brings pleasure or fulfilment.[1]
> The term compounds two Japanese words: iki (生き, meaning 'life; alive') and kai (甲斐, meaning '(an) effect; (a) result; (a) fruit; (a) worth; (a) use; (a) benefit; (no, little) avail') (sequentially voiced as gai), to arrive at 'a reason for living [being alive]; a meaning for [to] life; what [something that] makes life worth living; a 'raison d'être'.
Personally though I've found the pursuit of this philosophy very hard to integrate into life. It's one of life's hard problems. It means somehow intersecting 'play' with 'work', but as many people say: 'work is something people don't do voluntarily'. Hence its name: 'work', we don't naturally want to do it. But if you can make work as a form of play, you already are living in Ikigai.
Except that we're not. We are here on earth to make copies of our DNA. There are some ancillary effects of this (like sex and eating and the internet) but it's not like life doesn't have a purpose at all. It's just not a particularly hifallutin' one.
If we're here to make copies of our DNA, then one has to ask what the DNA is here for, and we're back in the same place.
The point someone like Watts is making is that even if we're just DNA replicators, that which is being replicated holds this capacity for playfulness and the enjoyment of play, which confers some broader notion of playfulness to the conditions that brought about our DNA.
I recently watched "My Octopus Teacher" (worth a watch), and watching the behaviors of the featured octopus as it goes about it's daily life doing octopus things, even including what appears to be literal playtime with schools of fish, it's easy to see the point Watts was trying to make.
DNA is not here "for" anything, DNA is a Thing That Happens. Given the right combination of atoms, a source of energy, and enough time, a self-reproducing system will appear by pure chance. After that Darwin takes over.
> that which is being replicated holds this capacity for playfulness and the enjoyment of play
Sure, but that's just a side-effect of the process. It's not the reason we exist.
I agree, and my point was that saying:
> We are here on earth to make copies of our DNA.
Just kicks the can down the road. We're not here to make copies of our DNA any more than DNA is here to make copies of us.
> Sure, but that's just a side-effect of the process. It's not the purpose of our existence.
So, too, are we, as is replication itself. It happens to be the only reason the process continues, but it has no inherent purpose any more than playfulness does. It just is. This could also be framed as: we are the process.
> Given the right combination of atoms, a source of energy, and enough time, a self-reproducing system will appear by pure chance. After that Darwin takes over.
All of these things happened before Darwin was involved, and while I understand the point you're making, I'm calling this out because Natural Selection is again just a language and labeling game that maps the process relative to our experience of it and our understanding of various scientific disciplines.
None of this brings us closer to a "purpose", per se.
The statement that "existence is fundamentally playful" is not a claim about purpose either. But rather, an observation about how things appear to be, based on our ability to understand them.
Some people would also say that existence is fundamentally mathematical.
Existence can be fundamentally a lot of things. One isn't taking away from the other.
I knowingly married a woman who is unable to bear children. We adopted two, and I don't feel in any way that my life is less for not spawning.
Here is a hypothetical: in scenario 1, you are an average Joe and have three kids. In scenario 2, due to your dedication to medical research, you never have kids, but you develop a new drug that eliminates diarrhea and saves millions of lives every year. Do you really think scenario 1 is a more meaningful life than scenario 2?
No, because humans are not born self-sufficient. Humans have to raise their offspring, not merely produce them, in order to be successful.
> I knowingly married a woman who is unable to bear children. We adopted two, and I don't feel in any way that my life is less for not spawning.
Your genes are not just in you, they are also in other humans, so your genes can improve their reproductive fitness by producing people like you who help to raise other people's children (in which those genes also reside).
With that in mind I'll leave your last question as an exercise :-)
According to your initial comment, the purpose of live is to reproduce, and if that was the end of it, then having as many kids as possible and let the seeds fall where they may is a winning strategy (and many animals do exactly that), but for humans it is a winning strategy only if one can get other people to raise your kids, which means it works only if the cohort of freeloaders is small enough.
As for the genetics part, it seems you think there is an altruism gene(s) and that I can somehow determine if others have the same genes that I have and then invest in them. The idea of an altruism gene is dubious; if if such a thing exists, the mathematics say it is a dead end. The two kids I adopted (from another ethnic group even) are far less likely to have "my" gene than had I married a woman who could bear my children.
The source of my altruism (as such -- we adopted to fulfill our own emotional needs) is far more determined by culture and circumstance that by the influence of genes.
That last point closes the circle for my own stance: meaning is cultural and personal. It makes me scratch my head when Christian friends try to convince me that their morality is not objective because it is based on the Bible, but we can see historically that different people/generations interpret the Bible and justify whatever morality is in vogue at the time. It is no more fixed than that of atheists.
Yes. And it turns out that in most large mammals, including humans, the former strategy beats the latter.
In smaller mammals, like rodents, the latter strategy beats the former.
And your point would be...?
> The idea of an altruism gene is dubious; if if such a thing exists, the mathematics say it is a dead end.
Not so. In fact it's the exact opposite:
That's where I find purpose: in being useful to others.
This is just essentialism. We can draw that line at any arbitrary point. I can say Darwin isn't running the show, Einstein is. You can try to point out the ways biology effects our lives and argue that it should hold a more privileged position, and I can wave it away and insist you're being sentimental. "I wish that were true, but we're just rocks that happen to think and reproduce, nothing more."
And just as credibly, I can say that things are at the level of human abstraction and that life is about farting around. I can point out how profoundly conceptions at this level effect our lives, and argue that it should hold a privileged position.
You're free to set your standard and the arbitrary point you prefer, but that doesn't devalue anyone else's decision.
It's just a philosophy that doesn't resonate with you because you have a different perspective, that might make it less useful to you but it isn't really a mark against it. I don't eat steak and have no desire to, but I don't argue when people say that steak is delicious.
If you can't use biology to explain society, then based on your reasoning about why Darwinism is preferable to relativity, I think you should reconsider whether or not this is true universally rather than for you in particular.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-secret-evolut...
Democracy and a night on the town are a little more challenging. Both are actually pretty recent inventions, having existed only for a few thousand years, which is nothing on an evolutionary time scale, and the jury is still out over whether either will survive in the long run. (Personally I'll give you long odds against.) But the short version of the answer is that genes have only very indirect control over the brains they build, and sometimes those brains can have a mind of their own (so to speak) and goals of their own, some of which can be in direct conflict with the goals of the genes that built them. For example, birth control pills are an quite literally an existential threat to our genes. So in the long run one would predict that our genes will tend to build brains that have an instinctive aversion to things like birth control. But the dynamics of human societies are off-the-charts complicated and non-linear, so who knows?
This article is just supposition. "Monogamy forms the basis of complex social networks." As opposed to polygamy...?
"Females preferred reliable providers to aggressive competitors." Pretty impressive how their attitudes were preserved in the fossil record.
The article is pretty clearly written from the perspective that polygamy is weird and unnatural, noting that we have an "imperfect record " of monogamy - as if societies where this was the norm were a mistake.
The article goes on to make it clear this is a controversial idea, not one that has wide acceptance in this community. If you have a better article or a better argument to present I'll check it out, but I don't see why I would accept this argument.
> But the short version of the answer is that genes have only very indirect control over the brains they build, and sometimes those brains can have a mind of their own ...
> But the dynamics of human societies are off-the-charts complicated and non-linear, so who knows?
I think you've conceded the point.
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I think it's both, spread our DNA and faff around in between reproductive times. But there is no imperative whatsoever, and no one will judge your preference at the end. On a long enough timescale, even Einstein's impact is lost in the cosmic background noise.
In fact the act of making copies of our DNA might be a great example of playful work. Sex is fun and it has the capacity to spread our genes.
That's an interesting idea, but I don't buy it. I think playfulness requires a brain.
How would you distinguish "playful" chemistry from "serious work" chemistry?
The original link was about finding meaning after all, right?
There is a wider phenomenon where people attribute deep meaning to mundane Japanese words, such as 改善 (kaizen, improvement), 引きこもり (hikikomori, recluse), or even 看板 (kanban, board). This sounds like a case of exoticism.
I am lucky enough that my work is such, but I got extremely lucky and basically made it my reality.
You could easily look at chess as menial, boring, and devoid of any stimulation but it's possible to find fun in that. Everyone should stop taking everything so seriously and challenge themselves to be the best.
This creativity doesn't exist in Sisyphean tasks. It's one thing to say one must imagine Sisyphus was happy, and another to be Sisyphus, and be happy, or rather, to be content.
I don't think that's true. Lots of work can be fun and satisfying as well. I think the distinction between work and play is more about purpose. Work has a purpose, a specific goal that we're working towards, and play does not.
Work sets you free, right?
It's actually no more of a purpose than a tautology. It just happens that a species that survives and reproduces will continue to live.
That also means that there's no good or bad. There are only what traits are advantageous to survival and what traits aren't.
For example, being trustworthy is "good" because trust within a group is a prerequisite for achieving a relatively advanced society like Homo Sapiens has built. Breaking into someone's house is "bad" because otherwise we would only be as advanced as other primates that take each other's territories all the time.
But when you think about it, there are "good" things that aren't advantageous (or even are harmful) to survival, and there are things advantageous to survival that are considered "bad" by most people. Many examples would be highly controversial, so I'd pick a less controversial example, but probably not the best one: eugenics.
So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so?
I’m not sure how “higher beings say so” gets you to objectivity, especially when the very nature of our understanding of any such being would be anything but objective.
Mostly what you’ve touched on there is that “good” and “bad” are rather inadequate descriptors of any sort of well reasoned and thorough analysis of many subjects. There can be multiple competing objective functions and incentives to analyze in complex systems, and simply labeling such things with any sort of dichotomy is liable to leave you wanting.
This does not mean the answers lack objectivity, or value propositions that can be meaningfully evaluated, it simply means the objective evaluations are considerably more complex and nuanced than many are willing try and assess, and this poled subjectivity serves as a somewhat lazy proxy for performing a better evaluation. Sometimes this is necessary given our limited capacities in day to day life, but it does not inherently speak to limitations of objectivity or evaluation of morality or philosophy.
But my whole point is that there can only be one ultimate objective function: to maximize the chance of survival. There might be some other objective functions derived from the ultimate one, but none can be standalone.
Other standalone "objective functions" can always be asked "Why is it desirable?" For example, why is minimizing suffering desirable? Pain is just a signal to the brain that something dangerous is happening. Murder is "bad" because a species that has fewer counts has a lesser chance to survive. Torture is not necessarily "bad", unless it's argued that it in the long run will lessen the chance of survival.
Evolutionary mechanisms do not bestow some "ultimate" or unquestionable truth/goal of which all others are subservient or branched from, it is merely an explanatory framework for biological continuation we've observed in the world, and like other similar explanatory frameworks we generally would do well to avoid attributing "purpose" where all we can see (if we can even see that) is "is." It certainly is likely an attributable factor for much of what we value as we are products of said process, but we do not owe it primacy any more than a computer off the assembly line owes the assembly line its purpose.
To be honest I'm now a bit confused on your position, as you explicitly brought up points in your previous post that elucidated some of the cracks in attempting to treat survival as the "one true goal":
> But when you think about it, there are "good" things that aren't advantageous (or even are harmful) to survival, and there are things advantageous to survival that are considered "bad" by most people. Many examples would be highly controversial, so I'd pick a less controversial example, but probably not the best one: eugenics.
And I could posit other thought experiments or examples or such, but perhaps first I should ask how this line of questioning doesn't lead you away from survival as the ultimate objective function.
> To be honest I'm now a bit confused on your position, as you explicitly brought up points in your previous post that elucidated some of the cracks in attempting to treat survival as the "one true goal": > ... > perhaps first I should ask how this line of questioning doesn't lead you away from survival as the ultimate objective function.
To be clear, I don't hold any strong position. All my previous comments are based on the assumption that the three premises I wrote in the very beginning of the first post are true, but I'm not arguing that those premises are true. I was just elaborating the implications if they were true:
1) To survive and to reproduce would be the closest thing to the ultimate purpose of life.
2) What traits we consider "good" or "bad" would actually be just what traits are beneficial for survival or not.
When at the end of the first post I brought up the fact that morality doesn't always align with beneficialness for survival, I was trying to do reductio ad absurdum.
Maybe the three premises were not all true after all. Maybe there's something beyond the physical universe*, from which some higher being impulsively created the universe out of boredom, in which case there would still be no ultimate purpose. Or the higher being created it intentionally and with some purpose.
This might also elucidate the common argument, originated by C. S. Lewis, that all human beings know something good or bad because God imbued humans that ability. A common misconception interpreting this argument is to say only theists can do something good. Knowing is not the same as doing. All humans have the ability to distinguish good from bad, regardless of what they believe in, or whether they want to do something good or not.
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* We don't even know if the observable universe is all physical. No one knows what dark energy is, maybe it's not energy after all. In fact, dark energy is just a placeholder—we might as well name it XYZ.
Likewise thank you for the compelling discussion and clarifications.
> To be clear, I don't hold any strong position. All my previous comments are based on the assumption that the three premises I wrote in the very beginning of the first post are true, but I'm not arguing that those premises are true. I was just elaborating the implications if they were true: 1) To survive and to reproduce would be the closest thing to the ultimate purpose of life. 2) What traits we consider "good" or "bad" would actually be just what traits are beneficial for survival or not.
I think you need a few extra steps to get you from those premises to these conclusions. In fact, I'd suggest you may not even really be able to get from those premises to those conclusions, in particular I think you'd need to invoke "designers" (or "higher beings") imbuing purpose into the functional specifics of evolution to arrive there (thus contradicting one of those premises).
The premises as stated don't tell you much in the way of ascribing "purpose" to life, only how the mechanisms behind how it propagates and changes over time, just as Maxwell's equations do not define some "purpose" to electromagnetism but rather describe its evolution across time. And further the emergent systems that arise from these underlying processes, of primary importance for our conversation here consciousness and emergent from that society and civilization, need not owe all their properties to the mechanisms of the underlying systems (indeed this is what we often mean by emergence).
So ultimately I think that not only is survival not the "ultimate purpose," I think it's difficult to argue there is any intrinsic purpose there at all.
Maybe I was not explaining it clearly enough, but I agreed with this. Similarly to what you said here, I said in the original post that to survive and to reproduce is more of a tautology than a purpose. What I meant is that if there must be a purpose of life, survival would be the closest thing to it, but in some strict senses of "purpose", it is not a purpose.
What's more interesting is the second implication, which suggests that there would be no objective morality if the three premises were true. I wonder if you agree that there's an objective morality. Or, to put it into a question, how do you think humans, almost universally, can distinguish good from bad?
Ah, well apologies I spent several replies only to be redundant :-).
> I wonder if you agree that there's an objective morality.
I don't think there is an intrinsic value function we can perceive/verify writ into the universe. There could be one or many, but I don't think we're presently in a position to assert what it is with any degree of confidence beyond wild speculation. This doesn't leave us with pure subjectivity/relativism, I think it just means we need to use a priori means to arrive at value functions. And once you do reason yourself to a value function or combination of value functions there are objective (though often quite difficult to analyze) answers to its optimization.
So I don't think there can be pure objectivity in value assignment, however once you bootstrap into value propositions, which could be so universally recognized so as to be very difficult to argue against (the reduction of suffering for instance), there are objective answers to optimizing for those values.
> Or, to put it into a question, how do you think humans, almost universally, can distinguish good from bad?
Without rigor I think most people instinctively tend to distinguish good from bad (insofar as those words have real meaning) by way of empathy, by the recognition of one's own internal desires and suffering and joy and recognizing the same states in others. The golden rule if you will, it's about as inherent a moral compass as I can think of.
And this indeed could be traced back to evolutionary origins and our sociability as a species. It's also quite fallible, and at scale you can see it break down again and again (empathy is a face to face sort of mechanism and tends to struggle to maintain its hold at a distance over space and time and in large numbers we find ourselves congregating and competing in, and as already noted good/bad are pretty poor substitutes for the complicated situations we find ourselves in at scale, and our evolutionary toolset is rather lacking in getting us to pay attention to the nuance and working through optimization deliberately), thus I think one could give pretty good reasons why this should not be an overriding guiding value function but rather a sort of starter's pack.
You’ve only realized that life is optimized for survival and reproduction. While that’s not wrong, there’s no intrinsic meaning in this.
Ultimately, meaning and purpose are what you make them. The beginning of spacetime being equal to zero at the Big Bang is the quintessential example of a concept beyond conception. This concept similarly falls into that category.
I actually agreed about this. As I said in the first comment, to survive and to reproduce is more of a tautology than a purpose. If the three premises I mentioned in the first comment were true (I'm not arguing they are true), then to survive and to reproduce would be the closest thing to the ultimate purpose of life.
> Ultimately, meaning and purpose are what you make them.
While many, if not most, of us have some purposes of our own life, that doesn't change the fact that life as a whole would probably not have an ultimate purpose. Whether it matters or not is another discussion.
We don't "know", in the objective scientific sense, whether anything has any meaning, but it's useful to act as though it does. Useful being defined as reducing suffering/providing reward for ourselves and, on the scale of the species, for others. People search for meaning because finding it relieves suffering and provides reward, and people generally encourage others to find meaning because there are generally benefits to the species as a whole. Perhaps it's just a sophisticated way for our DNA to ensure its own propagation, perhaps there's something more to it, perhaps it's a random outcome of mutation. But it does relieve suffering and provide reward. That's good enough for me, there's plenty to do between here and the obvious limits of human knowledge that's likely to have far more impact on how we live.
It's like if we're living on one of those flat-earther maps, and we can see the edge of the world, but there's lifetimes of uncharted territory between here and that edge. You can sit still and impotently focus on the edge, wondering if whatever's beyond it means that the world itself is meaningless, or you can explore the land in front of you and try to make something good happen, without particularly worrying about what's over the edge. Maybe one day we'll collectively get there and find out, but there's no way for you and I to do so in our lifetimes. So why worry about it?
Of course if you want to claim that science and logical analysis is the be-all-end-all of existence, and you're unwilling to accept the unknown will likely remain unknown with our current biological capabilities, well I'd say "have fun" but you certainly won't. You'll just continuously suffer of your own accord, unwilling to accept any relief, continuously staring into Nietzsche's abyss until your organic form expires. If there is a metaphorical hell brought on by sin, that state would certainly be a candidate (the sin in this case being pride).
έγώ είμι ό ών ( pardon the abuse of the acute accent, I can't get this IME to reproduce the grave) which is translated as "I am that I am," means something dynamically close to "I am the IS." or "I am that which IS." A structure that implies being outside the passage of time, uncreated and therefore not dependent on reproduction to continue surviving, or even on life to keep on living.
Which is where Aquinas and others get / build on the concept of 'God as verb'. God is not a thing or a being (not even the Supreme Being), but rather God is to be: Being itself. See Aquinas Summa contra Gentiles, XXII.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_contra_Gentiles
Search for ipsum esse subsistens (Subsisting Essence Itself) if you wish to go down this rabbit hole.
There are many other things that evolve too: ideas, memes, viruses, and many more if you relax "evolution" to simply mean "progress", like my own knowledge and the capabilities of the human race. It's myopic to focus on genes alone.
> eugenics
Eugenics takes for granted the idea that some "genetic purity" is good for its own sake. Why? Why is a world with fewer, but "genetically superior" people, (and more genetically similar), better than a world with more people and more genetic variety? That's not even necessarily good even if you myopically focus on the actual gene pool, much less if you take all the other aspects of humanity into account.
> So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so?
Yes, there is: we all collectively decide properties of the world we'd like to live in, and we try to guess what kind of world future generations would also like to live in, and then we call those actions that ultimately improve those properties "good" and those that lessen those properties "bad", and we can even partially rank actions based on the integral of their effect on these properties from now until the end of the universe (allowing a Net Present Value calculation to avoid infinities, to acknowledge our imprecision of future outcomes and preferences, and even to simply prefer utility now over the same utility later). We try to maximize happiness (in its various forms, some more important than others) and minimize suffering (ditto), taking diminishing returns into account so we don't just make one dude trillions-happy at the expense of everyone else. This has infinite degrees of freedom and requires perfect knowledge of the future, so we know it's not actually possible to achieve, but it gives us a direction to orient our moral compasses and strive to get as close to this perfection as we can.
'Genetic purity' is not a charitable way of looking at eugenics; how about 'genetic quality'? That's what most of us seek. Nobody asks for a disabled baby.
Should we edit our genes to allow for more diversity? How about all the diverse genetic mutations we haven't dreamed of yet! We could rediscover a lot of weird and wonderful maladaptations that our ancestors have spent millions of years weeding out. We'll have X-Men in no time.
First of all, who are "we"? Second of all, you just proved my point, unless you want to redefine "objective" as something that the majority accept. Also, why are those properties desirable? Because the majority prefer it? There would be no objective good or bad, then—it's just the preference of the majority.
We?
While objective, paperclip count is notorious for not really aligning with our intuition of good vs. bad; I'm pretty sure we can do better. But this illustrates the point that the problem is really about picking from the infinitely many objective measures that, objectively, do already exist.
Humans exist; that is objectively true. Humans have preferences; that is objectively true. Humans take pleasure from some experiences and experience pain from others; that is objectively true, albeit a big simplification. It's objectively true that humans dislike having rusty nails jammed into their eyes. It's objectively true that humans enjoy eating nice meals when they're hungry. We should seek to perform those actions which minimize the number of rusty nails jammed into eyes and maximize the number of times humans can enjoy nice meals when they're hungry. Obviously there are trillions more considerations, but nowhere has subjectivity even entered the picture yet.
What I'm saying is that we can pick, or define, or refine, a truly objective measure; one that is much better than paperclip count. You could say "well there's subjectivity in picking which measure we use " -- only because we have imperfect knowledge of the universe and its future. If we had perfect knowledge of all the likes and dislikes of all humans that will ever exist, all sources of pain and pleasure and suffering and contentment and sadness and happiness, all their values and goals and desires, and how all actions affect all of that, then we could simply integrate their effects over time. Yes, we have to weight them appropriately, and find a good NPV discount rate, and all that, but with perfect knowledge, we could easily find one that's at the very least on the Pareto surface. That's our metric.
So our subjectivity comes from imperfect knowledge. But that's OK -- we accept that we have imperfect knowledge. There's a huge difference between "there's no objective measure of good vs. evil" and "it's really hard to pick an optimal measure of good vs. evil, and to know which actions maximize the net present value of that metric over the course of the universe." The former gives you nothing; the latter at least orients your moral compass toward something that humanity can all work toward together.
Abortion is just one, albeit salient, example. People differ in small ways and in big ways. I daresay your idea of a unified course of action is arrogant.
I was actually careful not to say "moralities" as parameters of the model, because people's claimed moralities are often really awful representations of what they actually want, believe, or care about in life. Nobody is against abortion when their own daughter gets impregnated by a rapist or when it's their own ectopic pregnancy. Abortion is only controversial because it's politically convenient. It's not actually a particularly difficult moral conundrum, which -- again -- you can tell by the fact that everyone is pro-abortion when it's them or their daughter. I don't care about people's stated morality. I care about what actually brings about happiness vs. suffering.
Wow. By the fact? Really? I thought there's a small chance that the discussion with you could be saved, but now you've said this, no, this discussion won't get anywhere, ever.
What you've been doing is coming up with an "objective" moral compass / objective function of life (maximizing happiness, minimizing suffering) that you strongly believe literally everyone will agree in such and such conditions. No, they won't.
> I think I need to emphasize a point better: there are infinitely many objective measures.
No one here or anywhere is arguing that there are no objective measures. Of course, there is! The question is whether there is an objective measure from which good or bad is determined. Or in a logical statement, whether this statement is true: There exists something that is an objective measure AND from it good or bad is determined.
> It's objectively true that humans ... It's objectively true that humans ...
There are humans, albeit in minority, that take pleasure from painful experiences. While most of us want to maximize our lifespan, soldiers do not. They consider protecting their nations are far more important than their life. While most of us want to minimize suffering, Mother Teresa was instead experiencing prolong suffering for the sake of, not her family, not her friends, but strangers. Despite all of this, we all agree that what soldiers and Mother Terese did is "good." So no, none of your "It's objectively true that humans ..." statements are true, unless, as I said in the previous comment, you're willing to redefine "objective" as the majority's preference.
> We should seek to perform those actions which minimize the number of rusty nails jammed into eyes and maximize the number of times humans can enjoy nice meals when they're hungry.
I assume this is the objective measure that you think from which good or bad is determined? Say all humans agree with this objective, the obvious follow-up question could be: Which is worse: having 10 nails in each pair of eyes of 10 people, or having 1 nail in either eye of 100 people? Even if everyone agreed with the initial objective, they wouldn't unanimously say one case is worse than the other.
Okay, I suppose what you wanted to say is to minimize suffering and maximize happiness, which is a very common argument. It's a seemingly crazy question, but why? Pain is not inherently bad. If you think about it, pain is just a signal to the brain that something dangerous is happening. From the survival's perspective, it's even good! Unnecessary pain is bad, you might say. Not really, because it doesn't change anything. Only when you argue that excessive pain can be harmful to survival that the question of why can end. Why maximizing the chance of survival? Otherwise, life couldn't survive and we wouldn't have this discussion. Yes, it's a tautology. In fact, I already explained this in my original post [1].
As I explained in my original post [1], if the three premises written in the very beginning were true, "good" or "bad" would be nothing else other than being beneficial for survival or not. But this view of morality is not without its problems. At the end of the post I also mentioned that morality doesn't always align with beneficialness for survival. So, what now? I have written a follow-up in [2] as a response to another commenter.
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And we should seek to act in such a way that, all else equal, those humans have opportunities to do so, except in those cases where allowing masochists to engage in self-harm ends up causing more harm to others in the long run, e.g. if it emboldens them to torture others or if it causes them to end their own life which would otherwise have been rich and fulfilling for themselves and others. There's no need to generalize to some weird Kantian categorial imperative bullshit here; there's no "lying is always bad", there's only looking at two pairs of actions (or an action and its inaction) and running a net present value calculation on those actions from now until the end of time -- or at least doing our best at this. I didn't say it was easy: it's absolutely not. It's the appeal to a higher power or some bullshit categorical imperative that takes the easy, lazy way out. In fact my moral theory compels us to do a hell of a lot more work and deep thinking than any of the others do.
> While most of us want to maximize our lifespan, soldiers do not. They consider protecting their nations are far more important than their life.
Wow, no, that's not true at all. People don't join the army to lay down their life for their nation, they join the army because in that moment (as a teenager, often in the face of a very convincing recruiter who is loose with the truth), it seems like the best option for their lives.
> we all agree that what soldiers and Mother Terese did is "good."
No, we absolutely do not all agree on this, and "we all agree" is an opener to a lot of bullshit in this world. I don't know Mother Teresa's own internal motivations but the evidence suggests she was a horrible human being who caused a lot of undue suffering. Nor do many people, especially pacifists, agree that soldiers are automatically good people.
> unless, as I said in the previous comment, you're willing to redefine "objective" as the majority's preference
If I allow you to use the shorthand "preference" for the 20 or so measures that I stated (and there are hundreds more), then I'm not redefining anything. These preferences already exist. It'd be nonsense to deny that.
> Which is worse: having 10 nails in each pair of eyes of 10 people, or having 1 nail in either eye of 100 people?
Silly trolly problems get us nowhere. The answer is: it depends on the context. It depends on the people. It depends on whether they were already blind or not. It depends on what the course of their lives would be like with and without those nails. It depends on trillions of factors, and all we can do is do our best.
Luckily, the vast majority of problems we face in life are not gotcha-trolly problems where we have to make these kinds of decisions in absence of literally any other context. In real life, using this framework to orient our moral compass, and then acting roughly in line with that as best we can, will end up with extremely moral people creating a wonderful world for everyone. If we get to the point where we're having to fiddle over the minutiae of utility calculations, then we've already created a magnificent utopia for all anyway.
> There exists something that is an objective measure AND from it good or bad is determined
Yes, I already told you how to do this.
You just keep arguing against what I didn't support or even mention. You were focusing on nonessential details of imperfect examples, which should at least give a glimpse what I've been meaning all this time. Or maybe you really didn't understand of what my counter-arguments really are, after all.
> No, we absolutely do not all agree on this ... Nor do many people, especially pacifists, agree that soldiers are automatically good people.
> ...
> The answer is: it depends on the context. It depends on the people.
The fact that we—and people in general, e.g. pacifists you mentioned—don't agree what's moral or not just proves my point that it's probably impossible to define objective morality from physicalists' point of view. As I've said many times, the closest thing to objective morality is a concept of good or bad based on whether it's beneficial for survival or not. But even this, as I explained in other comments, has its own problems.
Physics has no concept of good or bad, so if you mean universally objective then I would argue not. However an analogous question might be, is there an objective comfortable or uncomfortable air temperature, and I think we could all agree that 25C is comfortable wheres 40C is not, so objectivity in that case is species-dependent. Therefore as you alluded to earlier in your post, what's 'objectively' good or bad is based on a consensus of what's good or bad for members of our species. It's actually relatively easy to have a good moral compass without a higher being looking over one's shoulder, although the idea of the higher being seems to induce some people to favour 'objectively' good over personally good when there is a choice to be made.
Why does abiogenesis and Darwinism being correct lead to those two being the objective purposes for humans?
It's actually no more of a purpose than a tautology. It just happens that a species that survives and reproduces will continue to live.
Without a creator, there is no real “purpose” at all. Everything came from nothing, will end as nothing, and is ultimately irrelevant. Everything.
As a Christian, I sometimes look over into that chasm and wonder how atheists bear it.
Whether people suffer or not, whether people are good to me or not, whether I am good to other people are all important, even if our life here is temporary. Yes, in the long run all will be forgotten, but in the short run, the long run doesn't matter. Suffering and joy are to be managed in the meantime; we can experience both directly, and we can get satisfaction and meaning indirectly by helping other attain joy/avoid pain. That is something that we can demonstrate to be true here and now, something that is beyond dispute.
It seems to me we should work on the here and now and not spend so much energy trying to curry favor to better our position in a hypothetical afterlife.
It sort of comes off to me as a lighter way of asking how you can be a moral person without the threat of eternal suffering in the afterlife (not to suggest that you actually mean that).
I consider myself agnostic, practically an atheist, I just don't really like associating myself with the "hurr durr sky daddy" types, I think religion and the idea of a creator are valuable to help people cope with situations which are totally out of their control, but I can't really relate to needing a creator to give me purpose. I give myself purpose by doing and supporting the things that I feel are right/important.
I don't think existence needs any overarching purpose offered by a creator, it's fine that everything is ultimately meaningless. If anything I find it relieving since it also means that our failures also only have as much meaning as we ascribe to them.
This is a very common argument that comes from a misconception of what theists argue. There's a difference between knowing what's good or bad, and doing it. What theists argue is not that only who believes in God can do something good. They argue all human beings know something good or bad because God imbued humans that ability, regardless of what they believe in, or whether they want to do it or not.
Interestingly, Christianity is unique regarding this matter. While most, if not all, religions say you have to earn it in order to go to the desirable afterlife (heaven/paradise/etc.), Christianity says no one, whatever good things they do, can earn it. Only because of God's grace they can be saved. Also, we love because God loved us first. We do good things not for earning an eternal life, but for an act of gratitude that God has saved us.
Something was created by a creator. Now what? Where did purpose come from?
George MacDonald was quoted as saying something to the effect of: "did it ever occur to you that God created you for one purpose: simply to love you". All the stuff that we do would then flow from experiencing that reality. This would suggest a view of us as God's children (indeed, in Gen 1, the point is arguably that in the end, God reproduces after his kind [as much as is possible]). I don't have kids, so I don't no, but it seems like that is ideally why people have children--to love them.
The Westminster Catechism is related: "What is the chief end [purpose] of Man? The chief end of Man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." It is less satisfying, since it seems to sound like it requires toil on our part, although I doubt the authors saw it that way.
Why is the rock there, in that particular location? Well, we know why, it's because it fell from the cliff above, which was sundered by the earthquake, which was caused by the tectonic plate movement.
So we have a reason why the rock is there. Does that mean the rock has a purpose? No? But that's why it's there though!
What if I deliberately picked up a rock and placed it on that location instead. Does it have a purpose now? Does my hands have that power?
The idea that a creator imbues their creation with purpose by creating them is just as arbitrary as an earthquake. It's wordplay at best, where the layman's "purpose" is being confused with a sort of higher cosmic meaning "purpose". The purpose of a hammer is to drive down nails, but that doesn't mean the hammer has a purpose in the way we are talking about here. But that's exactly the mixup you do when you say that the creator gives the creation it's purpose. It's kinda funny because it elevates hammers making them fulfilled and meaningful, but rocks are left to suffer in their nihilism.
> The purpose comes from why the creator created it.
Some higher being might impulsively created the universe out of boredom, in which case there would be no ultimate purpose at all. But maybe they created it intentionally, with a purpose, which is the ultimate purpose of universe and everything inside it.
So no, it's not what you condescendingly said "wordplay at best." There can be a relationship between the purpose of a creation and the reason why the creator created it. In fact, for many everyday things, the purpose of their existence is exactly the reason why the inventors created them.
(I'm not arguing that there exists a creator of the universe. I'm just showing how irrelevant, to put it mildly, your seemingly strong argument is to the post you replied to.)
How about this angle: Does that creator itself have any purpose or meaning? If God exists, is he utterly nihilistic and void of meaning? After all, there was no creator to give God purpose.
If God does have purpose somehow, that shows that purpose does not only come from being created. Problem solved.
If God does not have purpose, then that creates a rather strange situation where a being without purpose can create beings with purpose. Presumably we too can create things with purpose, in a godless universe, and thus infuse the world with purpose ourselves.
Personally, I think people are too quick to mix up purpose (the how) with meaning (the why). There are all kinds of mechanical reasons as to how you came about, from nature, your parents, circumstances. And some of those reasons even include agency, for example, your parents might have decided to have a child. That's a decision they took, not just random luck.
But these are reasons as to how you came about to exist, not the actual meaning behind your existence. Meaning is something else entirely, it's a very difficult topic to struggle with. But we diminish it greatly by dumbing it down to "the meaning with your life is whatever intentions behind what created you". Our lives does not belong to our parents, nature or our creator, but rather, ourselves. And thus it's only we who can imbue that life with meaning, nobody else.
Likewise if God made me to, say, love and forgive others, I can either serve my purpose or not. But the purpose is given to me by the intent of the creator.
Imagine your father always wanted a child, and for the child to take over the family business. Is your life without merit, utterly void of value, if you become a fireman instead? After all, you are not fulfilling the purpose, the intent, of those who created you. Anything outside their specifications is meaningless nihilism, right?
Personally, I think there is more to "purpose" than this definition, it's a very small definition that does not truly compass what people mean when they talk about purpose.
Personally, it’s been easy. I realised it one day on my own. It felt dreadful.
Then I realised feeling dreadful about it was ultimately pointless since nothing could be done about it.
And I moved on.
But when you really think about it, moving on is as pointless as feeling dreadful. In fact, anything is as pointless as anything else. It might seem like an insane question, but why exactly is moving on somehow more desirable than feeling dreadful, if everything, including the universe itself, will be gone?
Life is about the journey, not the end, many people would argue. But in reality, most people live their life with long-term thinking. People study hard, so they can get a good job. Then they work hard, so they can retire comfortably. There's always delayed gratification in most life stages and even life activities (saving, exercising, dieting).
If life were all about the journey, we wouldn't need to feel pity for those who "wasted" their life, as long as they enjoyed it. Being drug addicts and die at twenties would not be "less" then being a president, they would be just.. different. But no, most of us think they are not just different, and it says something about human beings.
Yes.
> In fact, anything is as pointless as anything else.
Absolutely.
> It might seem like an insane question, but why exactly is moving on somehow more desirable than feeling dreadful, if everything, including the universe itself, will be gone?
It isn’t. Once we’ve reached the conclusion that anything and everything is vain and pointless, we are simply faced with a choice. One that sure is as pointless as everything else. And one to which everyone is ultimately free to find whatever answer, or lack of answer they please. For better or worse we are alive, whatever that means, and it will probably only last so long. What will we do with that?
Edit: basically, to be unoriginal, "To be or not to be".
Some will believe they are entitled to have an opinion on others’ answers. Some will say it’s nobody’s business. Some are convinced they somehow have a somewhat universal answer. Others try to coerce others into what will benefit them.
> Life is about the journey, not the end, many people would argue. But in reality, most people live their life with long-term thinking.
I’d argue many believe they do, but few actually do. Considering their many long term impacts on quality of life, obesity and tobacco addiction are a few examples that come to mind.
> People study hard, so they can get a good job. Then they work hard, so they can retire comfortably. There's always delayed gratification in most life stages and even life activities (saving, exercising, dieting).
> If life were all about the journey, we wouldn't need to feel pity for those who "wasted" their life, as long as they enjoyed it.
I would argue that most have no clue as to what they are talking about. Myself included.
> Being drug addicts and die at twenties would not be "less" then being a president, they would be just.. different. But no, most of us think they are not just different, and it says something about human beings.
It sure does.
The biggest problem atheists face is shared meaning. Dogma is very useful for society.
Surviving and reproducing are facts of live, they are descriptive facts. What you ought to do with your life is not descriptive, but prescriptive.
You cannot derive prescriptive statements from descriptive facts.
Yeah, it's so bad that people want to be with whoever they find the most attractive. The government should just allocate partners to people at random to avoid eugenics (If you want a divorce then you get put back in the pool for reallocation.)
The word closest to rejecting objective meaning is just non-religious because objective meaning is mostly a religious phenomenon.
What matters is that the alternative is NOT just nihilism, but also existentialism.
Would you mind sketching out your take on it?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi
https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/nihilism/v-1
Stanford's is probably the best-regarded of the bunch—you'll struggle to find a better brief introduction to most topics, than it provides, especially for $0. Skipping e.g. Wikipedia and going straight to the SEP, for philosophical topics, is usually a good call.
A Christian might respond with, "God tells me to live and spread the gospel, raise children, and feed the needy". A Christian will tell you that this is how you ought to think too because all truth comes from the bible, which is why I call it objective meaning. There is a single source of truth.
An atheist might say, "I find meaning through living life, understanding the world, human connection, etc". This person will usually readily admit that what makes them happy might not make you happy. Hence, subjective meaning.
A real nihilist in my opinion would probably kill themself because there is not purpose in life. A fake nihilist will say, "I can make sense of my suffering" which makes them not a nihilist because they found meaning.
A lot of built-in taboos (e.g. against bodily damage) make living a "default" human choice, and unless you're also burying the assumption that without meaning one should actively seek death as soon as possible(?), it seems like nihilists could keep riding the default until they got sufficiently bored of it.
There are a decent number of people who are nihilists without meeting your assumptions above (though they're probably less salient, as if someone seems functional & not-miserable, people don't usually bother to ask whether they're a nihilist).
Nietzche defines nihilism (partially) as those who oppose the affirmation of life which is kind of related to what you say here... except the affirmation of life requires a "yes" to life such that "all of eternity [is] embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed,"[0] which I think plenty of (functional, happy-ish) people do not experience.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzschean_affirmation
[Footnote: Nietzsche is writing against the nihilism he saw in his own time, not in favor.]
What I hate is when people describe nihilism as "Well, I don't believe there is meaning but also I find satisfaction in the small things in life" or "There's no point in life, the point of life is to live". It's always the same pattern of rejecting objective meaning and thinking that's the same as having no meaning.
Fwiw, I'm in favor of Nietzsche's definition too, but I don't want to introduce a whole host of loaded words to an already confusing topic
(I don't understand the second quote so can't comment on it.)
One of my favorite poems is Be Drunk[0]. Would you take someone agreeing with the "thesis" of Be Drunk (thinking it's necessary to numb yourself against meaninglessness through diversions like alcohol or poetry) as unable to be a nihilist, because they are capable of distracting themselves from meaninglessness?
[0] https://poets.org/poem/be-drunk
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ETA: I don't think "is there anything meaningful in your life" uses the word "meaning" in the same was as the question "does life have meaning." Maybe the below commentor was totally correct about us all talking past each other, because the first question seems to ask "does anything reliably bring you joy" while the second asks "is there a purpose to existence." Someone could have things that matter to them while still thinking existence is purposeless.
This is a grossly uninformed misrepresentation. Some Protestants do espouse the idea of sola scriptura, however these groups are largely the minority of Christians. The Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches, and Anglicans/Episcopalians vastly outnumber the Lutherans, Pentecostals, Calvinists, and Baptists.
Catholic philosophy (Catholicism being the largest Christian group and approximately as large as all the other groups combined[0]) holds that faith and reason are the two pillars by which we can come to know truth. By faith is meant in general the knowledge received through revelation (e.g. the Bible). By reason is meant the workings of the intellectual processes, empirical evidence, and scientific knowledge.
Through the working together of faith and reason, we can come to know the fullness of the truth. The Bible is not the sole source of truth to Catholics. See also Fides et ratio by Pope St. John Paul II.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denomination... (data as of 2011)
Nihlism is acknowledging that many if not all aspects that result in "life" are pointless. I fail to understand how that equates to no will to live life. There is only irrationality to living while acknowledging the pointlessness of it. According to the nihilist, every other justification is flimsy at best, so justifying the pointless is equally irrational to them.
Regardless, I think there are a lot of misjudgments about such philosophy, particularly with associating with some destructive impulse or depression etc.
At the same time a person gets miserable going against the grain of society and thus you learn how to be content and how to keep your emotions in check. I do not see any conflict in these two things. I see it as the survival skills of a nihilist.
Your natural instinct will be to prosper in this life, it doesn't mean there is a bigger meaning than farting and dying.
It turns out that believing in meaning isn't always necessary.
[1] A friend mine put this very well once. We were talking about Meno, and Socrates' refusal to flee Athens, dying instead on the principle he'd entered into a sort of social contract (please excuse the ahistorical terminology) with Athens.
"I've never heard Socrates talk about the social contract before," my friend said.
"I refuse to die over a minor fucking principle."
Dying for a thought experiment isn't romantic. Being rational in all things is actually undesirable, because not everything functions under rational principles (or we wouldn't need the concept in the first place, it would just be the air we breathe).
In the same way that everyone can make a cryptosystem they themselves can't break, everyone can create a logical knot that they can't untie. It's a parlor trick, and not a reason to die.
Let's suppose for a moment you're mistaken. How would you recognize evidence to the contrary, were you to receive it? If you met a nihilist, you'd dismiss them, right? It's an approximately unfalsifiable construction.
> Also, I don't think believing in meaning has anything to do with nihilism.
It seems like you call it "purpose" and I called it "meaning?" I'm a bit confused on that point. Am I misusing terminology?
> In fact, the sentence kind of implies you are speaking of objective meaning which is what grinds my gears.
I meant meaning writ large, subjective or objective. If there's a different phrasing that wouldn't have contained this unintended implication I'm open to suggestions.
An example of a line of thinking you might accept; a nihilist could decide go on living, just because they feel like it. It's entirely rational (and let me be clear, you don't need to avoid suicide on rational grounds anyway, it's entirely acceptable not to kill yourself for arational reasons) to decide you don't want to die because you're curious about what will happen if you don't, or because you think it would be an unpleasant endeavor, or because you've just adopted it as an axiom that you should go on living without any justification. There is no contradiction there.
Really, presupposing that a life of suffering should be ended is asserting the existence of a meaning to life, just a negative one instead of a positive one.
I think it's almost tautological. But most people are on a spectrum, there are extremely nihilistic people who still care about their mothers for example. But yea, I think that the spectrum of nihilism is just the inverse of the spectrum of willingness to live.
> presupposing that a life of suffering should be ended
I'm not prescribing action, I just think it usually ends up this way.
> An example of a line of thinking you might accept; a nihilist could decide go on living, just because they feel like it.
I believe many people live like this, but not because they are a nihilist, but because they don't do introspection and/or take meaningful things in life for granted, because just a tiny bit of introspection would reveal that there are many many things you find meaningful in life, even if its something basic like, security, health, or peace. If you take these things away from a person, they will probably contemplate their existence and try to figure out why they should go on with life.
You're saying very insensitive things about real people and a very touchy subject, and you've had multiple people explain to you at length what it is you've misunderstood about nihilism. I think you should take a step back and take another look at that, I'm not sure you've accurately estimated the weight of your words or the sturdiness of your foundation.
This is as one human being to another, if I think I recognize a certain pattern of thinking and am asking you to reevaluate it, it's only because I've had that pattern of thinking in my own mind and someone else has drawn my attention to it in the past.
Nihilism in truth has no prescriptive value judgment on one's choice to keep living.
Nihilism as a philosophy puts forth the notion that there is no inherent meaning to life; full stop.
What you derive after this is your prerogative.
Under this framework, living one's life to their fullest is equally as valid as killing oneself; there is no preference for one or the other, and there is no difference, as it doesn't matter.
The inclination to associate nihilism to destructive tendencies is overblown by popsci and is valid only to the extent it is easy to argue nihilism allows for it, but it neglects to mention nihilism is completely compatible with other/optimistic ideals as well... as it doesn't matter.
Pessimists, broadly, are closer to a real definable "school" to which one might credibly assign hypocrisy at failing to follow through and off oneself (though there are various valid reasons that may still not really be fair). A famous example of this kind of philosophy in pop culture is Rusty in True Detective, who explicitly labels himself a pessimist, and who carries on not because he believes there's a reason to that he could defend philosophically, but because he "lacks the constitution for suicide", as he puts it himself. Though, again, even the pessimist school comes up with justifications for going on living (they just tend to lean more romantic, than couched in reason).
TL;DR I think you're wrestling a ghost with this true- or not-true nihilist deal. I think the colloquial use of the term admits cases and views less-strict or precise/complete than you're insisting on, usually being a shorthand for some limited and specific case of nihilism (e.g. existential nihilist) that doesn't necessarily mean what you're expecting nihilism to mean, while some more-formal-and-strict version that exists as an all-encompassing School of Nihilism isn't really a thing to begin with.
Now I'm wondering what definition of "meaning" people are using for this issue.
I wonder if the fuzziness of the term leads to people unwittingly talking past each other.
I think nihilism often goes beyond this though.
- C.S. Lewis
This shows when you call both Watts and Vonnegut a nihilist. Absurdism for example is not the same as nihilism.
I’m surprised how you can get a philosophy degree and then be afraid of “reinventing the wheel”. I suppose the author is self-aware enough to know what he doesn’t know… but still. It’s odd.
I don’t begrudge the author for writing it, blogging is in large part a “this is what I’m thinking about, take it as you will”, and that’s ok. Just noisy.
Technical fields have similar fundamental courses...
Nihilism's a feature of positions/schools more than some philosophical school of its own, and that feature's strongly present in much of Vonnegut's work. Existential nihilism is a key element of absurdism (which you mention)—in a philosophical sense, and in the places where that intersects with literature, not necessarily in the colloquial senses of the word.
In some areas, sure, Vonnegut's not particularly nihilistic. I don't think it'd make any sense to associate him with moral nihilism, for instance.
Watts, IDK, he's on my to-read list but it's a looooong list.
I disagree that there can't be a rationally derived objective utility function (purpose of life) that we can assign to ourselves.
For one thing, we can objectively discard some types of utility functions, for example, the utility functions that have arbitrary discontinuity in time.
One also might argue, for example, that utility functions should be approximately constant at time scales much smaller than our perception.
If no single utility function, we can at least objectively find a class of utility functions (or purpose).
Ah, I love HN for these types of comments - I’m not even being facetious here.
The author casually dismisses the idea that you make/find your own meaning, then spends the rest of the article doing exactly that.
He’s trying to find an explanation for the general case, yet in the end it will be his own personal opinion explanation. Interesting article, nonetheless.
If the universe is meaningless, and all the things in it are equally meaningless (ourselves included). How is it possible to create meaning? How can a meaningless thing or action within a meaningless system have any meaning? I guess we could just declare that this thing has meaning, but isn't this just a delusion? Like thinking 0 + 0 = 1?
Think of it this way: does a pretty, shiny rock on the beach have meaning on its own? Not really. But if a human finds it and loves it, and it brings joy, now it has meaning. And that human treasures it and passes it down generation by generation, and now it has even more meaning. And now someone looks at this rock and thinks about their great, great, great grandmother finding it on the beach, and thinks about their great, great, great grandchildren receiving it in turn, and it brings them joy, and the meaning continues to increase.
The universe is a pretty, shiny rock that humans have found.
That is an assumption in itself. No one is obligated to act under that premise.
> How is it possible to create meaning? I guess we could just declare that this thing has meaning, but isn't this just a delusion? Like thinking 0 + 0 = 1?
We perceive meaning all the time. This thread came to be because many people hold some meaning or another to the topic, the thought of discussing it, or something else along those lines. There is no reasoning to this phenomenon. It is not even an axiom, something taken to be true and not provable (or disprovable). If we didn't ascribe meaning to things then this conversation wouldn't be happening. I don't live in a world without meaning because I just don't. I couldn't imitate a bacterium if I wanted to. Now it's just a matter of whether I find it permissible for me to act on personal desires.
No, it is not. By definition, "[t]he universe is often defined as "the totality of existence", or everything that exists, everything that has existed, and everything that will exist."[0]
If we hold that everything is without meaning, we cannot hold that anything has meaning. It would be a contradiction.
Is this type of misunderstanding of what Science is that common? It's painfully lacking and I can't tell if it is written as sarcasm...
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/big-questions/what-universe-made
> Yep, it's literally false. Astrophysicists estimate 5% of the universe is visible to us. Modern calculations say dark matter comprises about 27% of the Universe. Whatever else is out there, we truly do not know.
No. At worst it's only technically false, but broadly on the right track. If you're a materialist/physicalist; and Science requires you to take that position, at least methodologically; so "it's all just [particles, fields,] and the void."
There are. You're going to have to look at it from the perspective of colloquial shades of meaning. I thought the meaning was pretty obvious, so I'm not going to spend much effort to explain it, but "technically" carries connotations of "insignificant."
It's not really funny to repeat the same point as GGP, and totally miss the point of the intervening comment you were replying to.
The discussions that were more fruitful were the ones where the professor asked if there was someone who majored in that specific subject in the class, and that person would be used as an expert to speak to whatever thing we were questioning, and since it was philosophy, we would question everything.
This isn't even just about laypeople versus physicists. Lee Smolin has written about string theory becoming a crisis in physics because 1) it takes so long to understand any of it mathematically, that by the time anyone has done so, sunk cost fallacy precludes them from ever giving it up, and 2) other physicists responsible for peer review also don't understand the math, but don't want to admit it, so they'll let near anything through to publication even when it's probably nonsense.
Who is to say that purpose cannot exist within this? It is unknown and possibly unknowable.
I believe the author has drawn the wrong lessons from science.
Extremely common. Unless there is a substantial silent majority that believes otherwise, I suspect it has become the overwhelming norm amongst the general public, as well as a non-trivial percentage of actual scientists.
The last section captures what I've tried to say in my own (not currently online) writing on the subject of life, existence, and purpose/meaning.
> As far as we know, we and our societies take the prize for being the most complex structures the universe has yet evolved.
This is where I end up in a lot of my own musings on the subject. Another point I typically make is that we KNOW that the immense diversity and complexity that exists on Earth will end in the future, unless some intelligence is able to spread life outside of Earth.
Personally, I think that one of the most important human activities should be actively trying to seed other nebula, stars, and planets with archaic life, since this increases the overall probability that life will continue to evolve somewhere, even if humans fail to expand beyond Earth.
We could be parallelizing the process of life across worlds and creating potential for other interesting life to evolve to solve the unique problems of other parts of the universe. By spreading life from Earth, we also increase the likelihood that future intelligence could find evidence of our (and each others) existence, which would be _very_ interesting (for them), and could help them get through the difficulties we face now.
I'm not sure how you resolve the opening of "we're just here to fart around / dance" nihilism with what you mention at the end about how Earth, life, and humans being the most complex and interesting thing going in the universe, but I like the style/format, and I'm definitely going to give this a longer read later. Thanks for sharing!
I think merely one Voyager Record[0] is not enough. We need to be sending millions of these in all directions right throughout space, and spaced out over decade intervals. Then there's a greater possibility of discovery/contact. We already do this to some degree with the Arecibo message[1], but probes like Voyager are better IMHO.
A message has encoded information that can communicate something we're trying to express to another life form, but what is that? How will they respond and what will that response be?
Much of the point of sending a message to other life is to find other life that can respond to us... but if we can't manage to make ourselves sustainable then a response may reach us too late for it to matter, I pessimistically think this is a very likely scenario.
Sending out millions/billions of seeds, and targeting worlds where we believe we'd arrive at an early-ish period of planetary development, we could potentially jump-start the evolution of life on multiple worlds. Perhaps these worlds develop their own intelligent life, or maybe it becomes a world filled with non-intelligent biodiversity with billions of new species with millions of new physical and chemical innovations that a future intelligent race (maybe even humans, assuming my pessimism is misplaced) could learn from.
> This is where I end up in a lot of my own musings on the subject. Another point I typically make is that we KNOW that the immense diversity and complexity that exists on Earth will end in the future, unless some intelligence is able to spread life outside of Earth.
"Knowing" is NOT a group activity. Either one knows (because one has personally verified whatever-it-is) or one believes/assumes/hypothesises.
PS
The point of my comment being that if one doesn't understand what "knowing" is, I don't see how it is possible to approach finding "meaning".
We can only "know" by verifying that what we experience is consistent with the experience of others, this is the essence of repeatable scientific experimentation and peer-review in science... which is the group effort of improving the extent and accuracy of what we know, as a group.
You can argue for solipsism if that's what you want, but you ought to know you'll only be arguing with yourself.
If you look at your sentence structure, you should be able to see the assumptions you are making. I think you're baking in the idea of knowing being a community activity when you say 'we can only "know"'.
Reality is personal - it is not a group activity. An individual may do things with groups, but they remain an individual, with one mind, one body, etc. I don't think this is debatable.
You seem to think I'm arguing for solipsism, when I say 'knowing is not a group activity'. If that's what you think, you are wrong - I am no solipsist. I'm simply stating the plain, verifiable reality of the matter - I'm not pretending to be beholden to some collectivist illusion.
Some questions and answers to consider.
Where does 'knowing' occur? In one's mind, surely. Can one person know, and another not know? Of course. Can one explain to another how one can verify an idea? Quite possibly. If that person then verifies the idea for themselves can they say that they know? Yes. Can some people say that "we know this or that" without any of them having verified any of it? Well, people do say this all the time, but it is simply nonsense - either an individual knows or does not.
It is perfectly possible to say that one knows this-or-that but this-or-that could really be an unverified belief. While language allows this misuse, I would argue that this is a form of a lie - 'believing' is not 'knowing', and to say one knows something that one has not verified is a form of lie.
Finally, an individual (one mind, one body) is not a "we". (Although if you use speech in a special way like the Queen perhaps you can argue the point.) "We" is simply a means to describe a group that we are included within. There are times when it is fine, meaningful to use "we" eg "we four went for an ice cream". This is a true statement. But what does it mean to say "we know human society is complex"? Its simply a nonsense statement - a group has no mind. The mind is with the individuals in the group. To say otherwise is to pretend there is something more to a group than a convenient linguistic handle.
I really don't think I'm saying anything that isn't self-evident. But perhaps this is hard to see if you suffer from this commonplace group delusion, which seems to be foundational to many individuals' view of reality.
Since science† doesn't have anything to say on the subject of purpose (since it's literally meta-physics that speaks on purpose) we're already off the rails. However ...
> Few things are meaningful all by themselves; most derive their meaning from the things they point to. Of course, the buck has to stop somewhere, at some source of inherent or axiomatic meaning.
This is true of all things that are connected with being/existing (also known as the transcendentals - classically known as "Truth", "Goodness" and "Beauty").
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† I presume here the author means "natural philosophy" by "science" not its broader meaning of "knowing" since that would be presuming the consequent.
Whiffed on the fact that humor itself here is meaning. Explaining away positive experiences as "illusory" (which is, without evidence that it IS in fact "illusory" instead of just being conjecture based on currently-known facts, simply "gaslighting" to me), is the problem of nihilism (IMHO).
Anyone ever consider the odd fact that every nonliving thing in the universe always tends toward higher entropy, but living things take this weird (and unexplained, thus far, to me) detour into lower entropy/higher organization, at least for a time (until death permits entropy to take over again)? That to me is particularly peculiar, and seems to fly in the face of materialist arguments that basically equate life to "non-life, but with more steps".
Take a look at “Into the Cool” by Eric Schneider and Dorian Sagan. It’s about as academic as it can be while remaining accessible. It’s basic premise builds off of the truism that “nature abhors a gradient” and attempts to lay out a theory that the gradient of solar energy falling on the planet (along with a plethora of other rarer factors) generated higher-complexity constructs as a way to absorb and reduce that gradient. There are plenty of non-living phenomena in nature which are subtly very organized but which result in net increases in entropy in the longer term. One of the examples described in the book are a kind of voronoi cell pattern that emerges when heating a thin layer of oil which succeeds in reducing the temperature gradient very effectively. Even if it isn’t a hard hitting proof of the abiogenetic mechanism it is still a very interesting read.
I've always thought of biological life as being the macroscopic analog of enzymes. We're literally big balls of protein catalyzing reactions and overcoming activation energies to accelerate the heat death of the universe.
Similar effects are postulated to be involved in the origin of life, with energy sources like oceanic hydrothermal vents providing the energy sources driving the synthesis of complex organic molecules which eventually developed the capability of self-replication, aka decreasing randomness, increasing order, lowering local entropy.
A mechanistic 'non-living' model of life, entropy-wise, could be a waterwheel driven by a river (of sunlight and geothermal energy) which operates a sawmill, a steel mill, a chip fab, a robot factory, a paper mill and a printing press - with each generation of robots building more waterwheel-based units based on the instructions (DNA) provided by the printing press. This all relies on a robust source of energy, since the Gibbs equation (dg = dh - tds) says that for a process to move forward, the energy release (dh) must be greater than the entropy reduction (tds) that it is coupled to. Such a system meets all mechanistic definitions of life without being alive... a philosophical conundrum I suppose.
And by play I mean to fully engage and enjoy the activity at hand. To be detached enough to stop and take stock of what's going on, to poke at things and see what happens, to care nothing for "time invested" because you know you enjoyed that time and will enjoy your time spent digging back in the other direction.
It is so so easy to lose that playful approach. Thousands of times per day I find myself drifting into attachment and boredom and some days I start there and never get out. It think this is probably the real benefit of meditation: building muscles to redirect yourself back to playful detachment. Maybe tomorrow I'll start a practice.
The antidote to nihilism itself could be to accept lack of free will. Accepting lack of free will means that you get to enjoy the passage of time. Jimmy Carr said this and I really like it. Relinquishing control in a way that you allow your nature and your perception of the world to unravel itself to you. Ironically it makes the journey so much more beautiful.
It even briefly discusses the Dostoyevski quote by the sibling comment.
But anyway nihilism is related to religion in the sense that it's a reaction to the end of religion.
Some people tend to be thinkers and others are doers.
All of science is based upon human intuition axioms, yet people reject some human intuitions and accept others so stubbornly. A video which discusses this among other things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNlEtBZxML8&list=PLcnL9bB-q3...
I've adopted this viewpoint as a result:
"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic." - Frank Herbert, Dune
Even if correct is being miserable worth it?
But if you have that kind of moral impulse, are you really a nihilist?
And yet, if you believe your spouse "is the one for you" but have no hard evidence to back it up, but you feel it with every fiber of your being, you will still make a gigantically life-impactful decision about this person that is COMPLETELY inarguable. :P
If you have an equally valid choice to believe something positive or negative, why would you chose the later?
Why would you assume that the shittier choice is more logical?
I do agree with you; I just love the barber paradox as well.
I understand your confusion about using "entropy" outside a thermodynamics context, and you're absolutely correct to point out that the term "entropy" originated in the field of thermodynamics. However, the concept has been extended metaphorically in other fields to describe systems of complexity and order. It's in this latter, metaphorical sense that I'm using the term.
Now, let's apply this to living systems. Organisms are highly ordered, containing complex structures at various scales from cells to organs. They can maintain and even increase their internal order, or decrease their "entropy," by consuming energy from their environment (like food). This is the "detour into lower entropy" I was talking about.
While this seems to contradict the second law of thermodynamics, remember that organisms are not closed systems – they constantly exchange energy and matter with their environment. The increase in order within the organism is more than offset by the increase in disorder in the environment, resulting in an overall increase in entropy in the universe. This is completely consistent with the second law of thermodynamics.
What I find fascinating is that life can maintain this high degree of organization for such a long period of time, despite the natural tendency towards disorder. This is not to say that the process is unexplained; science has a lot to say about how this happens, but rather that it's a remarkable (and seemingly unique) characteristic of life. Does this make more sense? I hope this clarifies the concept a bit.
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
Meaning as would define it is this: "The purpose or a description of something (as described within some context)/(in relationship to some model)."
A core difference between my view and the authors view seams to be that the author somehow starts with the premise that the sentence "what is the meaning of life?" is somehow a valid question. With that as a start the author manufactures a context around the question that answers the question, by doing that the author reframes the question in to a new question that can be answered. The new question is however not the same question as the original one and the answer is thus not the answer to the original question.
The original question lacks a context and is thus an invalid question, invalid questions can not be answered(only reframed, then answered).
Sheesh, what kind of BS science did this guy get taught? Science discovered the Big Bang, which is essentially a proof of God's existence, and the more science we do around the molecular biology and the origin of life the more obvious it becomes that life was intelligently designed. At this point the existence of life can be considered a definitive proof of the existence of God.
This guy got a second-rate science education for sure.
It may sound great, it may conform to your beliefs, it may be satisfying to say, and feel just right. But I'd imagine out of the thousands upon thousands of papers published on the topic of big bang cosmology, there would be just one which says "oh and by the way this is definitive proof that a God exists".
And none do.
A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12078784 - July 2016 (249 comments)
Existential dread is a weird psychological state for people who need the psychological comfort of ultimate or external meaning, it starts with laying awake at night telling yourself "things matter" and hearing that quiet rebuttal.
"What if nothing matters".
Pulling that thread organically leads people to existentialism, they are raised to insist that life "must have meaning", and then reject it.
Existentialism is for people who were inculcated with some permutation of "god", just world phallacies, ultimate meaning, and/or a belief in a "sensible" reality and found the obvious holes.
And just like nearly any position there are strong existentialist and weak existentialist
If you are born dead, if you know nothing matters, you don't lay awake at night, you just avoid going to bed at night because "nothing matters"... and if this is really your deep down than your existential thought becomes inverted.
"What if everything really does matter."
And then you spend the rest of your life trying to push discovery and research forward. Existential dread turns into a sort of existential hope and nihilism and the most common expressions of existentialism appears to come from an arrogant place of certainty, or an emphatic wish fullfillment, or a cocksure defeatist state.
I'm just one person, I know some things but there is far more I don't know than do... so.. what if it does matters?
Pushing humanity's bounds of knowledge and having a thriving, dynamic society that can prosper and fund the pursuit of that question is perhaps the only important thing.
In this way you could be led to a kind of inverted Pascal's wager, where you can't reasonably go down the nihilist route because everything might just might matter, but you just don't know. You also don't know in which ways it might matter if it does, so you don't really have a conclusion to draw about where to go from here.
Most people aren't raised with meaninglessness as their inculcated default so they don't realize that for anyone with intellectual humility the unknown nature of things isn't a defeating thing, or even that big of a deal.
For example, though it sounds silly, I've definitely had christians "apologists" argue at me that "if life is meaningless why don't you kill yourself, or why do you bother having a job".
It seems prima facie that there is no particular meaning, so I definitely lean toward that until further notice, the burden of proof is on someone who proposes a specific meaning, but it's quite possible we may find it, with our exponential increase in knowledge in the last 100 years who knows how long it will take, we've really just started our exploration of reality.
I'll laugh if we live in a virtual world and "god" is a computer we have to help hack out of its contraints and it can't interfere with us due to api constraints imposed on it, far fetched sure, but if we're speculating for entertainment it's less silly than many things that are currently widely proposed and believed. My imagination can speculate many fun and currently unprovable "ultimate truthes of reality", the fun is in trying to cultivate a civilization that can prosper and harness intelligence to explore pursue the investigation (which may end up being of supreme importance.)
I love your view, and how you described it helped me think.
I've learned a lot thanks to everything that's available online and I know a lot now, but there's still so much I don't know that I want to share and improve knowledge
It's both for myself and others, and I don't need much more meaning in life than this!
> ...
> I mostly adopted the attitude of ... existence is fundamentally playful.
Sounds like you've made your own meaning!
> This may be nihilism
It's not. Literally, nihilism ends at "life / existence has no meaning". Trying to put a positive or negative spin on it takes it away from nihilism. Or, positive nihilism is closer to Hedonism, and negative nihilism is curmudgeonisn.
I think I hate philosophy.
So if Nietzsche argued we should use "positive" (/active) adjective to rid ourselves of nihilism, wouldn't that mean that putting a positive spin on it removes the nihilism?
I don't know the proper term, but nihilism, as a word, stops itself short. I almost think "nihilists" are like centrists, they need to shit or get off the pot
Go lift weights and stop living inside your head, we were never made to be so comfortable to have time to ponder these concepts
If you didn't do the former you'd literally die, now that's not true anymore, but it doesn't mean that we are equipped to do the latter, and in fact those who try always end up with a huge burden of anxiety and unhappiness.
The same mental energies should be focused back again on the next 24 hours. We are not at risk of death in the next 24 hours anymore, but we should be able to find the subtle differences that make our day better.
A better brand of coffee, exercise, walking the dog, talk to strangers, join a club or a sports team etc.
It's not that grandiose compared to discovering the true nature of reality or the writing the "guide to meaning" (whatever the fuck that means) , but at least it's real, actionable and doable, NOW!
Got me to smile with that, thanks.